Forgotten Angels
by Lady Ayisha
Summary: Some time after Hunter's Moon, the clan has survived... all but one. An outlet of grief in a lonely graveyard leads to a love reborn in each other's arms.
1. Thinking of lost Angels

__

Laughing delightedly as he glided through the cool night air, he executed a single exuberant somersault before righting himself and landing silently in the shadows nearby. There it was, shining out from the tiny bazaar, glinting in the moonlight. A beaten gold tiara, the object of the young gargoyle's attention, lay glimmering on a bed of blue velvet. The gargoyle's eyes went distant as he imagined it sitting above a brow of a lighter shade of blue, holding back a veritable wealth of fiery red hair. **Perfect…**_ He touched the tiny pouch at his waist as the owner of the tent stepped away for a break. His claws caressed the leather, feeling the lumps of the two gold pieces inside. He had found the precious pieces while searching for firewood in the forest, obviously dropped there by some careless trader. He had told no one of his discovery; his clan, having no need for the small pieces of metal, would surely have given them to one of the castle-humans. And he needed them now. He wouldn't be stealing it, he reasoned. He would trade, just as the humans did, these little pieces of metal for that tiara._

Stealthily, he slipped around the corner, making sure the merchant wasn't coming back any time soon, and observed why he had been so eager to leave. The marketplace was empty. Glancing reflexively at the sky behind him, he gained an inkling as to why. The sun had only just gone down, leaving the world shrouded in the fresh darkness of a new night, and the night-jewelers, as this man obviously was, some time to be cooling their heels before their customers began to arrive. Moving to the empty stall, he gently lifted the beautiful piece of jewelry from the stand, wrapping it in the blue velvet to protect it, and left behind the pouch as he silently took wing to head back to the castle.

Goliath smiled sadly and moved into the castle, his eyes not registering much of anything. That had been so very long ago, before the Vikings had come, before the Magus had turned his clan, his family, to stone for a millennium… It had been before Manhattan … and before _Elisa_…

His eyes filled with unexpected tears and he shook his head to dispel them. Drifting through the hallways, he saw neither the members of his tiny clan or the sympathetic glances they gave him, which was just as well. He didn't need to talk, didn't need to know whose fault it had been, because none of that would help him now. His eyes were aching again, he noted, burning as they so often did these days after he'd been 'thinking' for a while. The only thing that seemed to help it was to get away from his clan and think further. Goliath slowly entered the library in the east wing and took his silent place on one of the couches hidden in shadow at the far end of the room. As he closed his eyes and drifted off into a phase that was not quite sleep, he knew, somehow, that another was thinking of the very same time he had just remembered, and the person was feeling the very same way…


	2. Memories

__

"A halo for my Angel…" He smiled with childish delight as she slowly unwrapped the shining piece and held it up to the light. Squealing with glee, she hugged him fiercely. "You remembered! That night after the Trials, when the humans had their fair! You remembered, and you got it just for me!" She kissed him with ferocious pleasure, her eyes radiant as he slipped it on to rest above her high, intelligent brow. As he had envisioned it, so it fit perfectly, holding back the rich cascade of sunset-touched hair. "Perfect, my Angel… So fitting, that its beauty enhances your own…"

He was so smooth with his words, so serious and yet so thoughtful, and he was utterly delighted with her reaction. She smiled gently up at him, leaning into him for a more gentle, if no less provocative hug. She felt him stiffen a little and look down to her in surprise, but then relax and draw her closer for a lingering kiss. Oh, and his lips, as smooth as his honey-drenched words! No matter what her clan-sibs thought, this one was hers… He was said to be, despite his awe-inspiring brawn, too quiet and withdrawn for his own good. He was, as second-in-command of the entire Wyvern clan, revered and respected for his leadership skills, but seemed too bookish and introspective for the role. As one of the only third-generation gargoyles who could read, he was considered stuffy and overly scholarly, never playing any of the games the youngsters cavorted in unless coerced into doing so. However, on the rare occasions when he did _play, he inevitably always won, and that spurred another kind of discontent, which forced him further into his shell of solitude._

Having lost his parents early on, he was everyone's child, and yet no one's – much as she was. She had, stories told, been found on the shores one night, a washed-up foundling left to die on the rocks. The clan leader – at the time, Goliath's father, - did not wish to leave her to die, so he accepted her formally as clan, even though his people never really made room for her. His son, as they grew up together, was the only one that had not laughed at her odd accent and strange features, features that were elven and soft rather than raw-boned and prominent. She wore only one thing that bore any resemblance to her homeland, and it was a bracelet of beaten gold the same as the tiara, twisted into the formed of a serpent with two heads instead of a head and tail. The heads met, golden tongues touching in an eternally cold kiss, at the top of her left arm. She never took the bracelet off, not even to bathe, and would often stare at it, trying to recapture the memories she thought it must hold.

She glanced at it now and it brought back a single memory of the time when she and the young male who now clasped her so closely had first met. She had been looking for a place to sit, away from her taunting clan-sibs, to gather her thoughts, wandering into what seemed to be an unused and dirty room, filled with shelves packed with large and dusty rectangular things. Ignoring the strange sights, she had crossed to the window and perched upon its sill when someone had cleared their throat, giving her a nasty surprise. Spinning around, she had spoken haughtily, demanding to see the miscreant who had frightened her so. He had stepped out, a large tome still held in one hand. She had recognized him instantly and had fled, but somehow, after her initial embarrassment had faded, she was drawn back to the room, and to him, later that night. They spoke until dawn and slept there in that room they had shared their secrets in that day hands entwined as they faced the sun. From that night on, she had returned there to him, to that strange room she was later to know as the 'library', being with him as he slowly emerged out of his lonely shell and she just as gradually learning what the strange things called 'books' were, and how to use them.

But tonight… She gazed up at the young male who held her, her eyes gentle and happy. Tonight, he had far surpassed any delight he could have given her with his stories. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him again, then took his hand and led him to the parapet.

From there, she led him out into the night so as to thank him properly… and privately.


	3. Demona

Demona rolled over in her canopied bed, stretching her wings and tail slowly. There was an ache inside of her, a persistent ache that wouldn't leave her be no matter how long she slept. She longed to be held, to be safely wrapped in the security of another person's embrace as she had been so long ago. Reflexively, she touched the tiara that still, after all these centuries, rested sedately on her brow. She was no foundling now, however; she knew exactly who she was.

A woman doomed to spend her eternity alone, thinking of nothing but the vengeance that had brought her here. Tears slipped silently down her cheeks, but there was no one around to wipe them away. Thunder rumbled ill-temperedly in the east, a sudden gust of wind bringing with it the heavy, sweet scent of rain. Demona rested her head in her hands for a few moments, allowing her spacious apartments to fill with the hoarse sounds of her suppressed sobs, then rose and spread her wings, gliding out into the storm and letting her tears mingle with the rainwater as they would.


	4. The Flight

__

"You can't catch me!" He taunted over his shoulder, expertly maneuvering his way through the currents and eddies in the air. It was true, she couldn't. Every trick she had tried thus far had left her further behind, swearing playfully at him though she knew the winds whipped the words away before he could hear them. A glimmer of an idea, however, had been forming since the last time, and she implemented it now, veering high above him into the clouds and into the calmer, upper currents of the night's air. From there, she put her considerable speed to work, not having to deal with his wake any longer, and dropped abruptly on top of him when she caught sight of him gliding directly below her. She felt him tense with surprise, then turn, pulling her closer to his body for a hot kiss. She melted against him, their game forgotten, melding as one body into his. As they fell, she felt him enter her and burst past the barrier that had kept her innermost secrets from the world. She gasped in brief agony and clawed at him, but the pain was swiftly replaced by a rush of pleasure so great she was sure her body was going to explode into a million fragments of ecstasy right there in the sky. She pushed hard against him, feeling that heat and pleasure double, triple, and keep rising faster, and felt him backing out and pushing again, the friction quite obviously having as much an effect on him as on her. The wind whipped past their faces as he groaned and clawed, pushing in a final time, and she screamed in triumphant joy as he shuddered and she burst with him, calling words in an old tongue neither recognized as they hit the ground, tumbling to a stop in an impassioned tangle of wings and claws. He drew out, leaving her feeling empty, and she moved forward again, aching, pressing against him and mewling until he gave in once more.


	5. Love in the Graveyard

Goliath knelt at the glossy headstone, eyes blurred with tears and memories. Had it really been so long? He ran unfeeling fingers over the unyielding stone, which bore the name of the only human to ever have respected him _and _his kind enough to become a part of their clan. He swallowed hard. So many times, she had been there for him, as he had for her, but not this time. This time, he had been too late…

__

"Elisa?" He called his beloved's name softly, entering her apartment and glancing around. "Elisa..?" The place was in shambles. What had happened? "Elisa!" His cry was more desperate now as he recognized the mingled scents of sweat, fear and, horribly, blood. Darting into the bedroom, where they'd shared many a night of tender lovemaking, he spied her lying tangled under the sheets, and his heart stopped a moment at her beauty. His talons, shaking from the fright she had given him, froze as they turned her over. 

The body was cold and still… completely lifeless. Blood stained the sheets and her clothing, emanating sluggishly from the gunshot wounds at throat and heart. His legs failed him and he fell, howling his anguish to a sky that did not care to hear him.

She watched him lower his head into his hands and let his grief go free from the tight constraints he obviously held it in during the nights he spent among his clan. But how many times had she seen him here at this very spot, sobbing and shaking, caught in the grasp of a grief that would not let him go? She yearned to comfort him, her own tears – _tears she shed for him! – _slipping down her cheeks. But the hatred between them, the jealousy and, she haltingly admitted, the fear of him rejecting her sparse comfort, held her to her spot.

At once, the memories flowed back, however, of the times they had spent curled together in the library, reading and telling stories, of the times he had held her while she cried, her entire young being shaken by the shock of the cruelty her own kind could have for her, an outsider. She longed, now, to hold _him_, to give back to him what he had given her so long ago, and she found herself stepping forward inexorably to do so.

At last, she knelt by his side and took him into her arms, holding him while he cried. And, shockingly, there was no rejection, no hatred – only a gladness, a happiness that nearly overwhelmed the grief radiating from him. And it was from _her touch._ When the tears had abated finally, he looked up at her and she could see the child-man she had known for so long, so long ago. "I…" His voice was the same, that deep velvet tone that had sent shivers up and down her spine, that still did send shivers through her. "I …apologize…" He turned away from her and started to rise, but she held him there, understanding now that it was not rejection he exuded when he pulled away, but shame. He was ashamed of showing his grief, had always been ashamed of his emotions, as if he thought that feeling them, as he so well could, would make him a lesser being.

"Wait." Her accent, so soft and cultured, didn't make her cringe now with the humiliation of long ago. "Let me hold you. You need it. _I _need it."

Goliath glanced back at Demona, startled at her words. She would hold him? This hardened creature whom he had once loved so dearly, but had given up for lost long ago, wished to be held? By him? All at once, he felt his arms obeying her words, even while his thoughts tumbled about in a turmoil of their own. She clung to him and he felt her shaking, felt her holding back her sobs in order to quiet his. He crushed her close, a single breath shakily destroying all the hatred and pain caught between them. "_Oh, Demona…_"

She hushed him, her talons stroking gently across his back and hair, her head nestled under his chin as she closed her eyes and felt him turn to stone.

The rising sun lit upon the gargoyle and the woman crouched with him by a lonely grave in the tiny churchyard, and the light seemed to grant a silent benediction to them both as it burned away with renewed strength at the last of the storm clouds.


	6. Mending Broken Hearts: The Beginning

She knelt there as the morning sun played with the fire burning eternally in her hair.  Quiet rose from the little graveyard as seam rises from the earth after the summer rains have passed, and the sun has returned.  No birds dared sing their songs; the moments of silence which ticked by were somehow too precious even for that.  She turned fully and gazed at the little headstone, engraved as it was with words she had never truly grasped the meaning of.  The body, which lay in the grave, had once held the life-beat of her most bitter enemy, a woman who had merely, she supposed, taken away all that she herself had pushed aside.

_But now… _Now, everything had changed.  Now, the woman was gone, and it was she, Demona, Dominique Destine, Angel – any or all of the names had been hers at some time, and she supposed she had not yet outgrown any of them.  Elisa Maza lay mouldering in her grave, and Demona wasn't only thankful – she was sad.  That human had been a very important part of Goliath's life – had, she supposed, been the one to keep him going, to brighten his life when _she'd _had eyes only for the possibility of appeasing her need to destroy that race which had been so cruel to her kind. 

It had gotten completely out of control.  She had been turned into a monster by those feelings of hate and self-degradation that had built inside over the centuries of solitude that she had spent, forever trying to find a cure for the disease which ate her from within.  Goliath had come close, on more than one occasion, to making her admit that it _wasn't _the humans fault, – not entirely, anyway, - to making her admit that perhaps, just perhaps, she, too, had had a part in the death and destruction of her kind.  If she had just accepted her role in the humans' life…

"Accepted!"  She spat into the morning sunlight.  "Accepted such degradation?  Such defamation?  When all we were doing was _protecting _them?  They and their worthless castles, their idiotic forms of government, their greed and hate and ingrained _fears _of _anything _different to what they know!"  She turned and kicked dirt over the graven words of the headstone.  "YOU protected your simpering, idiotic people all of your adult life, and what did you get in return but a bullet in the back?  What did my clan-siblings get but a mace to shatter their stone sleep?"  Demona tore at her hair, at her hateful human skin.  "Look at me!  I'm not like them!  I'm not like you!  I can't protect that which hates me, that which degrades me!  I'm _better _than that, better than them, better than YOU!"  She kicked out too far and her foot connected with the unyielding stone.  She hopped about for a few minutes, tears springing to her eyes, and when the pain ceased, she found she had changed directions, and was now facing the great stone shape of her former lover, the gargoyle she had held and comforted only an hour before.  "But I'm not better than _you_…" she whispered, kneeling down in the dirt and caressing his great, graven face.  "And I think I always wanted to be, always wanted to prove to you that I COULD be the leader you once saw in me, a leader who would bring to our people the respect and equality they deserved… Gargoyles aren't meant to be treated like animals, my love; we're not meant to be taught tricks and then grovel for affection when we do them correctly… We protected them because they protected us, and then _they _broke that circle… Not me, not our brothers, not our sisters.  _They _did, and why shouldn't they pay with their lives for the lives they took?"

Because those who committed the deed have been dead for a millennium… Don't you see that?  You weren't there when we went to Scotland, when Goliath saw all that he had left behind, all the horrors and grief he carried around with him for so many years.  Those men were but two in a race of billions, and one has gone to his rightful rest, has been forgiven; and the other has been destroyed as he should have been destroyed, for the evil deeds he committed against your race and mine.

The graveyard was no longer silent, as it had been, no longer sacred with the quiet that comes hand-in-hand with death and the long sleep that comes after.  A woman stood where the grave was, a woman of mixed human race, with the blood of Africans and Native Americans running side by side in her veins.  Her long, soft raven hair spoke of the Native Americans that had fathered her; the soft shape of her lips and her almond-shaped dark eyes spoke of the African tribes that had mothered and succored her.  Only her accent was out of place to the rest of her; and yet it placed her right at home here as a New Yorker, which she had been until the moment she had died.

Demona stared at the shimmering form of Eliza Maza in total shock for several long moments.  "And do you seek no retribution for the crimes against _your _kind?  They are too many to count, and the people responsible for them, dead or not, as just as numerous.  Why did you not seek justice?  Why, instead, did you protect a race which never thanked you, never bothered to care, never bothered to think, for just a moment, that the service you were rendering them was irreplaceable?"

_It wasn't about thanks, Demona.  I did what I did, and Goliath does what he does, not for the thanks, but for the internal feeling that comes with doing something right.  Don't tell me you've never felt it – that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you hold a kid in your arms is the same one he gets – and I got! – inside when either of us broke up a robbery, or stopped a mugging.  We punished the ones responsible for each crime in our own ways, and we gave a little back to the victims.  We allowed them to keep their hard-earned money, so they could eat, and keep a house over their heads.  We allowed the shops to stay open so people could go buy what they needed without fear of losing their lives when they went to buy a hairbrush.  THAT'S why we did it – for the good of others.  The more good you do FOR other people, the better it's going to get for you.  It's what my mother always taught me, and she's right.  I lived my life according to that rule, and I'm happy with my life now.  You have eternity, Demona.  Do you really want to spend it hating people?  _The swirling form gazed down at the kneeling human with the faintest hint of a smile.  _Take care of him, Demona, or I'll be back to haunt your ass, and don't think I won't do it._

Perhaps a year ago – even a month ago – she would have bristled at the audacity of a human even _thinking _about threatening her in such a manner, but the time spent in Goliath's arms the night before had changed Demona in ways even she had not fully come to grips with. 

She merely nodded now, her eyes focused on the giant statue of the gargoyle she had spent a lifetime learning to love, and ten lifetimes learning to hate.  "Where do I begin, Goliath?"  she asked, stroking the graven features with hands that hadn't been this gentle in eons.  All of Demona's anger had withered before the force of Goliath's grief.  Elisa's words had meant nothing; they were as they had always been: pathetic pleas endorsing a useless race.  But Goliath had loved that woman, that possible only exception to the rule in the race of fools she'd had the misfortune to be associated with, and Demona had sympathized – had empathized! – because she, too, knew what it was to love someone with your heart and soul, only to lose them to the darker desire and broiling hatred that brewed in other people's hearts.

"But where does one begin to mend a rift that has been growing for over a thousand years?"  Demona asked the silent graveyard. 

Elisa's spirit didn't answer, and when Demona glanced up to ask her question again, she found that she was alone.


End file.
